One of 160 copies, this one of 150 on japon, pochoir coloured, this copy also with publisher’s inscription ‘Hommage de bonne amitié à M.more...

Decises’. This is Nodier’s short story based on the legend of the medieval Sister Beatrice of the convent of Notre-Dame des Épines-Fleurie (Jura), a passionate young woman who left the community to marry a knight, only returning after bearing him several children. The Caruchet illustrations and ornaments consist of numerous elegant floral borders with marginal figures..see full details

An early manuscript version of a notorious libelle against the French royal mistress, which had been composed and published in London (1758-9) and suppressed on the instructions of the French government.more...

A vicious satire, highlighting Madame de Pompadour’s humble origins, the Histoire articulates the familiar anxiety over the power and influence of a woman at court. While not overtly pornographic, its theme is the profound immorality surrounding the court of Louis XV.

The author, Marianne-Agnès Pillement, a defrocked nun, is a most interesting figure, publishing several novels in Paris before being forced to flee to London where she made a living as a tutor to the children of the wealthy. The purpose of Histoire de Madame de Pompadour seems to have been blackmail. English, French and German editions appeared in 1758 and 1759 (it is not clear which came first) with London imprints though they may well have been printed abroad (ESTC hazards Leipzig, Holland and the Low Countries as possibilities for the several early editions). French agents in London were charged with the purchase and destruction of copies, though the number of distinct issues and editions suggests the publishers outwitted them. As always with such clandestine works, manuscripts were also a tempting option. Our example contains the full text (with numerous minor variations) together with some additional materials, including a version of Madame Pompadour’s will.

Loosely inserted is a mildly-plausible forgery of a Pompadour autograph letter dated 1749, accompanied by a much later expertise by the Paris autograph dealer Charavay declaring it “fausse”..see full details

Intended as the first of a projected series of works with the general title Idées singulières, Le Pornographe is an important early manifesto for the regulation of prostitution. It also holds a significant place in the historical etymology of pornography: meaning literally ‘one who writes about prostitutes’, being the first modern coinage of a word used by the ancient Greeks.

Restif issued the work anonymously, presenting it with a preface claiming that the idea was not a French invention at all but one found in the manuscript of an Englishman by the name of Lewis Moore. In a series of letters, the work presents an anatomy of prostitution, noting its inevitability in cities such as Paris and its dangers to public health and morality. Most interestingly, it then outlines a system of regulations, with well-managed maisons publiques, in which prostitutes are required to stay, where they are protected and cared for and where customers are strictly controlled. A major pre-occupation is the contemporary anxiety over the (wrongly) perceived decline in population, a decline to which prostitution was seen to have contributed. Restif proposes that pregnant prostitutes be required to fulfil their pregnancies and that their children should be brought up and educated within the maisons publiques and to take up alternative professions when of age.

This early work by Restif encapsulates both his social realism his utopian aspirations, both of which became major aspects of his later novels.

The imprint is false and the work was published in Paris by Delalain, who sold the author’s works, but who deleted his own name from the imprint after the first impression. The two issues are identical save for the title-page..see full details

First edition in French of Dunallan; or, Know what you judge (1825); the last published (but first written) work of this once much-read Scottish novelist (1782-1825).more...

‘Grace Kennedy's novels (at least eight) were all published anonymously and rapidly in the early 1820s, and met with considerable success, being reissued late into the nineteenth century ...’ (Oxford DNB). .see full details

First edition, extremely scarce, of this dramatic allegory of Anglo-Irish relations.more...

Trotter’s is a grown-up fairy tale, a masque-like play in which the dramatis personae are given both dramatic and Spenserian allegorical names. The Queen becomes England, Judith is Ireland and the eponymous Cindabright is also the Irish Patriot. A lengthy note explains that Judith’s dialogue references ‘the past state of a country abandoned to all the disadvantages of exclusion from a share in the social and political happiness and prosperity’. Trotter uses to explore a Spenserian world in which Ireland has recourse to question its historical treatment by the English.Trotter believes in the merit of fairies, which here represent Sentiment; she likes ‘their mystified nothings, through which we may detect beautiful wit at times’. In a common refrain over the loss of innocence, Trotter prefixes Cindabright by wondering, ‘Have the wonderful discoveries of modern science put to flight our pleasant fairies, with all their train of fancy play?’ Ultimately, Trotter need not have worried that ‘giant steam, with his real wonders’ would overpowered the products of make believe, for alongside the industrial revolution developed the peculiar Victorian preoccupation with fairies, most obviously articulated in era’s relative profusion of fairy paintings and stories. Seldom however are these corralled into patriotic invective, as here..see full details

An abridgement for children of Milton’s account of Adam and Eve, by the celebrated actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831).Siddons’ admiration for Milton was lifelong: ‘By the age of ten she was already responsive to the poetry of Milton … Perhaps his curious combination of sensuality and austerity gave particular satisfaction to this girl who, as a woman said that she feared to play Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as she should be played’. After her official retirement in 1813, Siddons gave frequent dramatic readings of Milton and Shakespeare – as represented by Lawrence’s portrait of her with works by both authors –and Paradise Lost was her preferred text. Manvell suggests that Milton’s ‘strong dramatic sense and the grandeur of his rhetoric must have excited her’, but Siddons also saw the merits of his material for a juvenile audience. As she describes in the Preface to the present work, she completed her abridgements for the use of her own children that they might develop ‘an early admiration’ of Milton, and now chooses to issue them for public consumption.The work provoked particular invective from the London Magazine, which acknowledged Siddons’ greatness but was aggravated by her Miltonian foray: ‘could she really condescend to become an authoress on the strength of an eighteen-penny copy of paradise lost and a pair of scissors?’ The reviewer accuses John Murray of being blinded by Siddons’ fame in his agreement to publish the work. The Story of our first Parents was issued in the same year under the separate title, Abridgement of Paradise Lost, which is identical in every other respect. Perhaps the variants were intended to appeal to separate adult and juvenile audiences..see full details

A fable in verse by the abolitionist, poet, translator—and creator of landscapes in feathers—Susanna Watts (1768-1842).Watts urges readers not to be misled by the diminutive size of her insect protagonists: ‘The following little fable is not presented to the Public as a mere bagatelle of amusement suggested by the fashionable popularity of Entomology, but under a serious, anxious, and most sincere desire to inculcate respect and tenderness towards all the inferior creatures’. Indeed, animal cruelty was a particular bête noir of Watts, as was slavery, and she published widely on these topics, producing an anti-slavery periodical entitled The Humming Bird (twelve numbers, 1824–5). The Insects in Council encompasses both issues, as when Dragonfly implores his friend the Emmet: ‘Come, free all your slaves, and deserve our / Applause, / And nobly unite in our patriot cause!’. After Watts’ death, the discovery of her scrapbook revealed a remarkable breadth of interests, with entries of poems, mementoes, statistics, portraits (many of women writers), and data on Hindu and Arabic languages, as well as detailed diagrams of the hold of a slave ship. The extraordinary landscapes which she crafted from feathers won a medal from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (ODNB). .see full details

First edition of the first published work by successful poet Caroline Norton (1808-1877).more...

Norton had a significant literary pedigree; her mother was the novelist Caroline Henrietta Callender (1779–1851), and her paternal grandparents were the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his first wife, the celebrated singer Elizabeth Linley. In 1827 Norton made what would prove to be an unhappy marriage to George Norton M.P., and ‘disliking and disliked by his family, threw herself into literary society’ (ODNB).The Sorrows of Rosalie was Norton’s first published work. Even by the accepted standards of cautionary tales, the eponymous heroine suffers particular hardship. Rosalie is persuaded by her lover to abandon her aged father, but the lover – a villain – deserts her soon after. With illegitimate child in tow she seeks her betrayer in London, but is forced to abandon the search and returns to her father’s house, only to find him dead. Maddened by grief and the needs of her starving child, Rosalie is driven to theft, whereupon she is imprisoned and, although she is ultimately acquitted, her child dies in prison. After much despair, she finds refuge in a remote part of the country where she devotes the remainder of her life to quiet contemplation. The work was widely reviewed; the Literary Gazette wrote, ‘there is nothing very intricate in the story of the Sorrows of Rosalie’ yet ‘these slender materials have been worked into a tale of intense and Crabbe-like pathos’. The Morning Post asserted that ‘simple, unaffected, and beautiful effusion will be perused and re-perused with still encreasing [sic] pleasure’. The New Monthly Magazine addressed the author’s gender: ‘The present little work is attributed to the pen of a lady. Were it not for the fair, we should have but little new poetry now-a-days. Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Mrs. Howitt, Miss Browne, and others of the beau sex, have all a woman’s constancy for the Muse, and do not desert the worship because it does not happen, just at present, to be the ton’.Identifying the edition of The Sorrows of Rosalie is complicated. The British Library has two editions; the present imprint and one in a different state with alternative pagination, as well as a ‘fourth edition’, which appeared in the same year as the first.. Jackson recognises that the presence of the fourth suggests the presence of second and third states, but these have not been identified. .see full details

First edition thus, of this compendium of the poetry of Felicia Hemans (1793–1835).more...

Called ‘the most considerable woman poet of the Romantic period’ (ODNB), Hemans published some twenty volumes and nearly four hundred poems during her lifetime. The present work, a posthumous anthology, includes her verse cycles Songs of the Cid and Records of Woman, as well as miscellaneous poems including ‘The Homes of England’, in which Hemans is thought to have coined the phrase ‘stately home’. Many literary peers paid tribute to Hemans following her death in 1835 of Scarlet Fever. In particular, Letitia Elizabeth Landon (see item 14) penned ‘Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans’ (1835) and ‘Felicia Hemans’ (1838). This was answered by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who remained ambivalent about Hemans’ talent. In his ‘Extempore Effusion’ of 1835, Wordsworth portrayed Hemans as an ‘insubstantial spirit’.The anthology’s titular verse play, The Vespers of Palermo, was first published by John Murray in 1823. Based on a mixture of ancient and contemporary discourse, it applies Staël’s and Sismondi’s interpretations of Italian destiny to post-war developments, including the Mediterranean Revolts of 1820-21. Other sources include Byron, Coleridge, Gibbon, Petrarch, Plutarch and Schiller. Vespers’ production at Covent Garden in December 1823 failed, in part because an ingénue was miscast as its heroine. An Edinburgh performance on 5 April 1824, promoted by Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott and starring Harriet Siddons, fared better. .see full details

The poems herein Include ‘Hymn’ by Amelia Opie (1769-1853), ‘The Angels’ Call’ by Felicia Hemans, ‘The Irish Maiden’s Song’ by Bernard Barton (1784-1849), ‘To My infant Boy’ by the Scottish novelist Leitch Ritchie (1800-1865), and ‘Youth’ by William Howitt, amongst others, as well as works anonymous on devotional themes. In her Preface, Hall explains that she was driven to choose largely devotional material, which ‘is selected (by the kind permission of friends) from various sources, for which [she begs] ‘most respectfully to thank all, as well as for some new contributions’.The first of the charming illustrations is the frontispiece vignette representation of ‘The Orphan’s Prayer’, after a poem in the volume by the Rev. Henry Stebbing..see full details

‘Second state’, expanded from the first edition of 1828 and on large paper.more...

An anthology by the Scottish-Indian poet Catherine Eliza Richardson (1777-1853).Although often referred to as Caroline, Richardson was born Catherine Eliza Scott in Canobie, Dumfrieshire. At twenty-two she travelled to India, whereupon she met and married her cousin Gilbert Geddes Richardson. She lived in Madras for her entire married life and for twelve years after her husband’s death, returning to Scotland in 1827 to take solace in ‘the company of her nearest remaining friends, and in the rural scenes which had been dear to her since childhood’. These ‘rural scenes’ dominate the present work, to the extent that her Indian experiences are eclipsed almost entirely by the Romantic iconography of the borders and minstrelsy. Verses such as ‘Kirk-Maiden of Galloway’ and ‘Lines for the Anniversary of Burns’ pleased contemporary reviewers; Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal praised Richardson’s ‘striking originality of thought’. First, second and third editions of Poems appeared in the first year of publication, each with amendments. This ‘second series’ is a more luxurious production, on larger paper of a superior quality, and with a handful of new poems..see full details

A diminutive volume of elegant verse by Liverpudlian poet and anti-slavery campaigner Jane Elizabeth Roscoe (1797-1853).Roscoe belonged to an active artistic and literary family. Her father William (1753-1831) was one of the founders of Liverpool’s first Society of Encouragement of the Arts, Painting and Design, which organized the first public exhibition of paintings held in any English town outside London. He was also an abolitionist, and later became one of nineteenth century’s foremost historians of Renaissance Italy. In keeping with her siblings, all of whom engaged in literary activities, Jane Elizabeth contributed to the two-volume Poems for Youth by a Family Circle (1820-1821) and was inspired by its modest success to print a small volume of her own verse, of which the present work is the second edition. As the contemporary annotations assert, Roscoe married Unitarian minister Francis Hornblower (1812-1853) in 1838, although the assertion here that she was 51 at the time of her marriage is incorrect. Roscoe remained actively involved with the anti-slavery movement, and would go on to contribute two sonnets to the Boston-based anti-slavery annual, The Liberty Bell.The present work is identical to first edition, but for the title-page. COPAC records just one copy of this edition, at the British Library..see full details

First edition of the first published work by successful poet Caroline Norton (1808-1877).more...

Norton had a significant literary pedigree; her mother was the novelist Caroline Henrietta Callender (1779–1851), and her paternal grandparents were the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan and his first wife, the celebrated singer Elizabeth Linley. In 1827 Norton made what would prove to be an unhappy marriage to George Norton M.P., and ‘disliking and disliked by his family, threw herself into literary society’ (ODNB).The Sorrows of Rosalie was Norton’s first published work. Even by the accepted standards of cautionary tales, the eponymous heroine suffers particular hardship. Rosalie is persuaded by her lover to abandon her aged father, but the lover – a villain – deserts her soon after. With illegitimate child in tow she seeks her betrayer in London, but is forced to abandon the search and returns to her father’s house, only to find him dead. Maddened by grief and the needs of her starving child, Rosalie is driven to theft, whereupon she is imprisoned and, although she is ultimately acquitted, her child dies in prison. After much despair, she finds refuge in a remote part of the country where she devotes the remainder of her life to quiet contemplation. The work was widely reviewed; the Literary Gazette wrote, ‘there is nothing very intricate in the story of the Sorrows of Rosalie’ yet ‘these slender materials have been worked into a tale of intense and Crabbe-like pathos’. The Morning Post asserted that ‘simple, unaffected, and beautiful effusion will be perused and re-perused with still encreasing [sic] pleasure’. The New Monthly Magazine addressed the author’s gender: ‘The present little work is attributed to the pen of a lady. Were it not for the fair, we should have but little new poetry now-a-days. Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Mrs. Howitt, Miss Browne, and others of the beau sex, have all a woman’s constancy for the Muse, and do not desert the worship because it does not happen, just at present, to be the ton’.Identifying the edition of The Sorrows of Rosalie is complicated. The British Library has two editions; the present imprint and one in a different state with alternative pagination, as well as a ‘fourth edition’, which appeared in the same year as the first.. Jackson recognises that the presence of the fourth suggests the presence of second and third states, but these have not been identified. The present work is identical to the British Library copy first edition..see full details

A provincially-printed volume by botany teacher and Quaker Sarah Hoare.Hoare’s poem first appeared as an addendum to Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany (1818), but is here accompanied by sundry other poems and an introduction. In this, which is addressed to her pupils, Hoare emphasises her indebtedness to Wakefield’s work—‘it was the first book of the kind I had read on the subject’—and explains that a change in her financial circumstances has necessitated her publication of the present work. Hoare taught the daughters of Quakers in Ireland for many years before returning to Bristol where she continued the work. For her, ‘botany was connected with the ideas of personal and social usefulness’ and the work takes on a maternal tone, with the medicinal properties of plants emphasised that they might be of use to those students of hers who have had children of their own. As Sam George has recognised, Hoare’s poem ‘posits a trustworthy science reliant on Quakerly practices of proof and honesty’.COPAC lists just four copies in the UK, at the British Library, Durham, Society of Friends and St. Andrews, to which WorldCat adds Haverford College, Miami, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale, in the US..see full details

First edition, apparently very scarce, of this encomium to Holkham Hall and estate, by Norfolk-born poet Sarah Biller.more...

Remodelled in the eighteenth century for its owner Thomas Coke (1697-1759), Holkham is one of the finest examples of Palladian architecture in Britain. However, as Biller notes in her prefatory Address, ‘no other native of Holkham has made any poetical effort to describe it’. Biller’s intimacy with the topography of the estate goes beyond agriculture and husbandry to include praise of the house itself; the volume is dedicated to Holkham’s owner Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester (1754-1842), and Biller is aware of his formidable collection of art and antiques, as well as his renowned library. The other poems in the volume are on devotional topics, with the exception of ‘Lines on an aged Female’ which tells of an attempt to take a portrait of an elderly woman aged 104 which was scuppered because of the demise, not of the subject, but of the twenty-five year old painter..see full details

First edition, very scarce, of this provincially printed book of verse by a distressed widow.more...

Espener uses simple and didactic poetry to criticise gossip and other malignant behaviour, as evidenced by her ‘Sketch of Dame Scandal’:‘A sketch of Dame ScandalI’m going to draw,The most ugly creature That ever you saw ...

Her black tongue is so large,It cumbers her mouth,And her manners at times Are very uncouth.’

The volume also includes the promised ‘sentimental’ material, including works on widowhood, hope, and domestic comforts. Also included are several epitaphs, including—curiously—two for beloved dogs. As she reveals in her Introduction, Espener writes to relieve the emotional and financial distress occasioned by widowhood. This appears to have been her only published work, although the lengthy list of subscribers attests to its popularity, and she gives thanks for ‘so great a patronage’. .see full details

First edition, in boards, of Joanna Baillie’s important Collection of Poems, which includes previously-unpublished works by some of the foremost poets of the day.more...

Successful playwright Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) published the Collection by subscription, in order to support a widowed school friend and her daughters. Baillie explained the situation in a letter to Lady Dacre, in 1822: ‘There is a friend and old schoolfellow of mine, who, after having been brought up in affluence and living in that state till within a few years of the present time, finds herself reduced to absolute poverty … I have offered to edit for her advantage a collection of poems in one volume, to be published by subscription. I wish the collection to be composed chiefly of MSS., or such pieces as have only been printed privately, and I am anxious that it should be in itself a creditable book, that I may not be accused of altogether picking people’s pockets for the benefit of my friend.’ The project was a success, as Baillie recognises in her prefatory address: ‘To her literary friends, who have so liberally, readily, and cheerfully supplied her with the manuscripts which compose this collection, she cannot too strongly express her obligations’. Indeed, Baillie’s popularity in literary circles is evident, for the pages of A Collection contain some of the most well-known poets of the day, including Barbauld, Fanshawe, Schiller (translated by Sotheby), Southey, and Wordsworth. Most of the works in the volume were unpublished, although some had appeared in print. Anna Barbauld’s ‘On the King’s Illness’ first appeared in the Monthly Repository; three of Catherine Fanshawe’s contributions had been printed in the past decade; Thomas Campbell’s, ‘To the Rainbow’, had appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, the same issue that included Baillie’s ‘To a Boy’ (which itself reappears here). James Hyslop’s anonymous anapaestic contribution ‘Cameronian Dream’—which later became a staple of Scottish verse anthologies—had appeared in the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany. These are exceptions however, and the vast majority of the pieces appear here for the first time, including two sonnets by Wordsworth and Southey’s ‘The Cataract of Lodore’. As perhaps befits its Scottish cause—Baillie’s beleaguered friend was a Scott—the volume opens with Walter Scott’s short play, ‘MacDuff’s Cross’, and closes with Baillie’s own borders-ballad ‘Sir Maurice’. Although the volume was not published for wider sale, a number of journals reviewed A Collection. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine quoted approvingly from John Merivale and John Marriott, whilst the Monthly Review and British Critic both gave high praise to Henry Galley Knight’s contribution. According to the Eclectic Review, ‘the most beautiful poems in the collection, decidedly, are from the pens either of females, or of scarcely known or anonymous writers … Such works as these shew, more than any half dozen splendid chef d’oeuvres, the character and spirit of the age’..see full details

The three decades following the publication of Byron’s narrative poem ‘The Siege of Corinth’ (1816) saw a profusion of dramatic and poetic reinterpretations, but this is one of the first (it predates Charlotte de Humboldt’s Corinth, A Tragedy by seventeen years). It is also one of the most original, for whilst Earle touches on Byron’s subject—the Ottoman massacre of the Venetian garrison at Corinth—Earle covers a much broader range of Corinthian history. She opens with an account of the 7th Century BCE tyrant Cypselus, before proceeding to outline the gradual moral decline of the city-state, before the arrival of Paul with his promise of salvation. The tone of the collection is devout, and moralising, but Earle wears her classical learning lightly and the poems are elucidated by useful contextualising notes. The other works include the charmingly-titled ‘Impromptu on a Nosegay of Roses’, as well as ‘Epistle from Bonaparte to Maria Louisa’ and ‘The Maniac’s Tale’. The thirteen-page List of Subscribers includes the Archbishop of York..see full details

First edition, very scarce, of this provincially-printed collection of poems, prefixed with a detailed account of the author’s financial distress.more...

In her sobering Introduction, Hart writes: ‘The dread of being overtaken by absolute penury, has induced the author of the following poems, to offer them to the public … and most of them partaking of the colour of her own dark and melancholy fate, it is necessary they should be prefaced with a short memoir of herself’. What follows is a curious narrative, punctuated with lengthy quotations from Hart’s correspondence with various financial institutions and private bodies. This demonstrates that Hart’s was a difficult life beset with financial woes, even before she became involved with a husband who misrepresented his estate, his means, and his debts. The memoir ends with copied correspondence between Hart and her husband’s creditors, whom she feels have treated her unjustly by taking her savings to make good on his arrears. She closes with a hope that ‘this humble volume fall into the hand of some friend to the oppressed, who will investigate the case, and endeavour to redress the injury!’ We may never know the outcome of this curious case, but perhaps inevitably the poems carry the tone of oppression and dismay, including ‘Written in Illness, and a Prospect of Death’, ‘Written during my Son’s Illness’ and ‘The Tear’. The Suffolk context—which is established with the attractive frontispiece of Lavenham Church—endures in a poem named for that building, ‘On Visiting Brenteleigh Hall’ and ‘Lines on James Reed, Esq., of Ipswich’..see full details